Grit Lab Report

Hi May,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 3: I’m actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were self-direction, hedonism, and universalism.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were social, verbal, and analytic.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a pretty good idea about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get an internship that interests me .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Let’s get that interview done .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Wow so, so proud .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Sleepiness .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I am done with work, then I turn off lights to sleep. .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in running .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Believed in when receiving critical feedback, and Believed in when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling nearly an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being i want the internship but i also want to maximise my time here at penn, so there’s a constant struggle .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .

In one word, you said it made you feel Surprised .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

"This is not a propaganda - you should be questioning it."
"I think the best part of being a student is to be selfish"
Career C made me thinking about what I really want to do, but I'm reminded to balance with the financial reality.
Grit is not a moral obligation
You need to put in the time and effort, and really, you can achieve any skill you put you mind to it
Stress can be enhancing
Choose easy, habit is situation to response
Lean on others
I have resources that I can give now

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Shannon Brooks
May you bring light and charm to any room you step into! From the first day of Gritlab, you were very welcoming, and I see how much you valued what everyone had to say, even if it was only the first five minutes of knowing one another. I admire your curiosity and willingness to question and go above and beyond, as this will serve you well in your journey in psychology and the world. I'm happy to have gotten the chance to take GritLab, but even more thrilled to have met someone like you. I enjoyed learning about resilience in the face of setbacks. I think your question, "Is leadership inherently good?" was an interesting one that I've never gotten the chance to think about before your project. Going back to who you are, which is a curious person, I enjoyed learning about the book you read and the analogy about "motivating the elephant." I'm happy that you're enjoying and strengthening your passions. You're already on your way to being a psych expert :)
Kevin Liu
May’s positive and personable nature was something I appreciated each week. She is very outgoing and easy to talk to, which made our group conversations more enjoyable, and throughout the semester there were many moments when she would eagerly seek out someone to talk or listen to, even when it wasn’t part of a formal activity. For example, May would always join the conversations with Dr. Duckworth during class breaks and listen to them with great interest (and try to bring me along too!). That she was able to form a more personal relationship with Dr. Duckworth to become further involved in her passion for psychology is a testament to her sociable and inquisitive nature. In addition to her friendliness, May was also willing to form more personal relationships by being open about her daily life and experiences, from her efforts in recruiting, to her close relationship with her older brother, to her admiration for cat photos. I know others (including myself at times) who might not have been so willing to open up, so I really appreciate her transparency, which was in fact infectious and got the rest of the team to talk a bit more about themselves as well. In these moments, May was also eager to listen and ask questions – there were a few times when it was just the two of us in class, but she nevertheless made the class more enjoyable than awkward. I was excited to hear May talk about her efforts to learn more through her Discovery Project – for example, I appreciate her efforts to meet new people and become a better person by attending the leadership forum and reading Switch. I also didn’t know that she was such an avid listener of podcasts (even before she started this project), so it was also great to hear how interested she was in learning more from experts. Finally, I enjoyed listening to May talk about her passion for psychology and her future plans, which show that she’s very motivated about what she wants to do in the future (having dedicated a portion of her project to it). It was a pleasure getting to know May this semester, and I’m confident that she will continue to uplift those around her in her future endeavors beyond Grit Lab.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.